


the lamb of your own forgiving

by wishtheworst



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 00:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21419518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishtheworst/pseuds/wishtheworst
Summary: Watching Duke leave has been part of Nathan's life for as long as he can remember. He's never really learned to let him go in all that time, and killing him to help stop the Troubles doesn't change that. After all, no matter how many times he leaves, Duke always comes back.
Relationships: Audrey Parker/Nathan Wuornos, Duke Crocker/Audrey Parker/Nathan Wuornos, Duke Crocker/Nathan Wuornos
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	the lamb of your own forgiving

A solid two weeks pass before Gloria shows up at the station with coffee and something from Rosemary’s that they both know Nathan won’t eat. She waits until 7:00 on the dot to settle into one of the chairs across from his desk, late enough that it’s just Nathan and a skeleton crew of officers at the station. Her glasses sit at a precarious angle just above the tip of her nose and, along with the coffee stain on her collar and the new lines around her eyes, suggest it’s been a long day. 

It probably has been. Things are getting back to normal, crawling at a snail’s pace but still managing to surprise Nathan as he realizes that fewer and fewer windows are boarded up on Main Street now. One of the construction companies is rebuilding the east wing of Haven High so the kids won’t have to be bussed out to the community college anymore. Someone is even talking about printing a weekly paper out of the old Haven Herald offices, although most people just get their news online these days. 

It’s getting easier for most people to accept, which means it’s getting closer to their being able to forget. But there are still snags in the fabric of life here, smaller every day but impossible to miss. People are still missing, bodies still being found in hunting camps at the farthest edges of town and on the beaches that stay impassable until spring. Candlelight vigils are woven into that still-frayed fabric as well, a clumsy addition stitched in over the normal weave of life. No one is ready to forget yet, even though they will be soon. They should at least try. 

No one can comfortably say ignorance is bliss with a straight face now, no matter how they were raised or what they would’ve admitted to before the shroud came down. So they hold the vigils and gather together in the dark and the raw spring cold to remember. 

Nathan has been to a few. At first he didn’t realize what it would be like to go alone – it had been a long time since he’d been on his own in a crowd without the buffer of Duke and Audrey and their narrow world. Now he goes because it feels like part of his job. Someone has to, especially for the people without much in the way of family and for the inevitable day that the crowds start to thin out. 

Only the solemn quiet in the darkness unnerves him as much as the awkward, brittle choir of voices that resonate within it. More often than not he puts in an appearance at the fringes now and slinks away when the singing and the tears begin in earnest. He’s noticed Gloria doing the same more than once. 

She pushes the carboard cup closer to him, a little coffee splashing out and dripping down the white cardboard. The last thing Nathan wants is more caffeine coursing through his blood, but Gloria is going to glare a hole through him until he takes it. 

“Thanks.” He swallows a too-hot mouthful that burns a path down his throat, pushes down a flinch and nods in approval. “Something I can do for you, Gloria?”

“He should be with Jennifer.”

There’s no hiding the flinch this time, but she’s polite enough to let it slide. “What?”

“He should be with Jennifer.” Gloria waves away any further questioning or disagreement with a fluttering gesture. “That’s what they’d both want.”

Nathan opens his mouth and closes it around cutting words and the anger that shapes them, choking them down the same heat-razed path the coffee blazed into his stomach. She doesn’t understand, and it’s not as if he can expect her to understand something he could never put a coherent name to. The only two people in the world who understood were gone, one dead and one erased from the record as if she’d never occupied it. 

“Gloria,” he says, choosing the words carefully around the minefields, “It’s been –“

“It’s been weeks is what it’s been. I can’t keep him at the M.E.’s office forever. I don’t want to, Nathan.” Her expression sharpens tenfold, challenging him to criticize as if he has that in him now. “He should be at rest, with her. It’ll be better for you. For everyone.”

“He’s dead, Gloria. Doesn’t really matter where, does it?” Nathan hates the catch in his voice and the way he can’t quite look up from his hands wrapped around the cup in front of him with enough force to pop the plastic lid. He can feel the rough cardboard sleeve and the slightly raised ink of the logo, the warmth bleeding through paper insulation, and he hates it. He hates that he can feel anything now, like this. “He’s dead, Audrey’s gone. I need a little time.”

She softens, unclenches her jaw and melts like a spring thaw. Letting go of the perpetual annoyance ages her somehow and she looks older, more tired. “Kiddo, there’s never going to be enough time. We both know that.”

Nathan shrugs, the smallest shift of his shoulders in acknowledgement. 

“What if we trust Dwight with this?” Gloria reaches across the desk as if she might pat his hand the way Nathan only ever saw her do for Duke. But the contact comes up short, stalling just before her fingertips meet his knuckles, and it’s for the best – he’s still not great with being touched. “Not letting him go won’t bring him back. Sooner or later, we all have to do it.”

He doesn’t bother to argue with her. He knows she’s right as profoundly as he understands that he’s not capable of doing what she asks. 

It would be easy to lean on Dwight for this. Yet Nathan knows that if he’d been on ice for months on end there was no way Duke would let anyone else bear the burden of making it right. Duke would take care of it, of him, in the same half-awkward, half-put-upon way he always had. He’d remember exactly where they’d buried the Chief and get a good laugh at putting Nathan in the ground next to him where they could squabble for the rest of eternity. He’d say the right things, even if no one was there to hear them. 

Then of course there’s another small matter that Gloria doesn’t understand and Nathan can’t let go of. When Duke crossed the upsettingly thin boundaries between life and death, he turned to Dwight and Nathan couldn’t even see him. Just like always, Duke favored an Irish goodbye when it came to him. 

“You’re right,” he admits, although Gloria doesn’t look any more convinced than he sounds.

***

Nathan drives out to her office after hours that Friday night and greets Vickie with a nod as she rushes out the door, the full extent of conversation he’s prepared to have at the moment. Gloria doesn’t make him sign for the body, doesn’t make him talk about it or worse, try to tell him how she feels. She watches from the doorway while Nathan gets Duke into the back of the truck, and it’s clear the wood frame is doing the work her spine isn’t quite capable of just then.

Nathan tries to think about anything else other than the fact that this dead weight is all that’s left of Duke, muttering, “You’re a fucking load,” under his breath. 

He can’t say if he’s talking to Duke or no one in particular – it depends on how much of Duke’s being he’s willing to attribute to a corpse. It’s tempting to think of him anywhere else and impossible to remember how little either of them ever believed in that. 

His hand hovers over the zipper on the black body bag for one heartbeat, then two, but he thinks better of it and slams the back of the truck closed without another word. The drive to the marina feels longer and shorter than he remembers all at once, and it’s a substantial mercy that Beadie’s office has gone dark, the harbor master nowhere to be seen. 

The police department boat is moored where it always is, third slip from the left. It always cracked him up, no matter how bad things were between him and Duke, that it was so close to the Rouge. Of course that was a lifetime ago – the Rogue was lost at the bottom of the harbor, taking everything good and bad that passed between him and Duke and the three of them with it to settle into the grit and seaweed beneath rolling black water. 

Nathan stares at the boat for what feels like an hour. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes. He promises himself that he’s going to straighten up, put one foot in front of the other, and get this done. 

Duke should be with Jennifer, like Gloria said. At sea. 

One more breath in, one more breath out, and he’d finally be ready. And then one more again. 

Nathan had stayed behind on the docks too many times when Duke went to sea alone to let that be the end of it. 

In the end, he turns on his heel, gets back in the truck and peels out of the harbor like he has at least a dozen times before, the burn of heartache and bile and abandonment as bitter in his mouth as it had ever been. He makes one more stop at the package store on the outskirts of town for a fifth of Jameson and doesn’t let himself think too hard about why he drives north and east. 

“You of all people understand, right? You know I can’t.”

Nathan’s last coherent thought is to wonder what the hell he intends to do if Duke answers.

***

Everybody always said Vince and Dave owned half of Haven, but Nathan remembered his father saying it was closer to three-quarters of the whole mess. A lot of it was public land now, deeded over to the town in their wills out of an impossible patchwork of shared ownership. The plot where is father is buried, ten acres up on the bluffs where the wind always carries salt in from the bay and farther out, straight out of the heart of the Atlantic, is Nathan’s now.

Finding the right spot is easy enough, even with the night sky bleeding down into the horizon like aether. Its pitch black is shot through with glowing points of light, and for half a second Nathan wishes it was a wall of uniform, fog-soaked grey. If it was, he could drive back to town and find things as they had been, Audrey portioning out batteries and small comforts, Duke finding a million little things to fix and patch and repair that gave him an easy exit from scrutiny. Everything would be terrible, everyone would be in danger, but they’d be waiting for him. Everything would be shit except that one essential thing. 

But this dark couldn’t be more different, clean and neutral, just distant enough to be private but not so far from everyone and everything normal to qualify as isolation. The headlights provide enough illumination to dig a neatly squared grave, and unlike last time Nathan doesn’t have to get by on sight alone. Blisters rise on his palms where they slide against the rough handle of the shovel and a dull ache spreads between his shoulder blades, reminding him exactly how much work, physical and otherwise, digging six feet into the earth demands. 

Still, Nathan takes his time with it until there are no new ways to put off the inevitable. He drops down next to Duke’s body, fighting the urge to see him one more time with every scrap of reason he has left. Gloria warned him not to, knowing him well enough to know he’d think about it. 

“I did what I could, but he won’t look like himself,” she’d said as gently as he’s ever heard her explain the grotesqueness of death. 

Nathan knew it with or without the warning. Duke stopped looking like Duke the minute the life left his body. He was there one second and gone the next, and everything changed in the subtle slip between presence and absence. 

And whether he’d seen it or not, Nathan had felt it. He was sure of it, as sure as he’d been of anything – he knew the difference between experiencing it through a veil of numbness and really feeling it, although at the time he was afraid to say anything about it to anyone, even Audrey. Because the terrible realization that followed was too heavy and too awful. 

He’d felt it because in that ineffable slip he’d finally done what he’d struggled with for a year. He’d forgiven Duke for everything, and maybe himself too. 

“I’m sorry.” It was impossible to tell if talking to Duke like this still felt as natural as breathing or as stupid as Nathan feared it was. He’d been there the last time Nathan came here to bury someone he’d loved and hated in equal measure. More or less Duke had been there for everything for as long as either of them could have remembered. “Gloria’s right, you probably should be with Jennifer.”

He tries to imagine Duke sitting next to him like he had the night they buried the Chief, a comforting presence that he couldn’t feel but recognized anyway. Duke would tell him to shut up, anything to avoid taking a long, hard look at things that would bring up the past or force them to make any kind of decision about a future. Things had been better between them than they’d been in a long time when he died, but there were still too many unanswered questions about what would happen if any of them lived long enough to worry about it. 

Now Nathan was left with all of those uncertainties and absolutely no ability to resolve it, a tangled, sharp-edged mass of guilt and regret that would require a lifetime to unwind. 

“Thing is, I loved you first. Not best or how you wanted, but I did. I was never any good at letting you go, and I can’t do it now.” The night is alive with sound around him, crickets and night birds trilling against the wind as the cold, wet air slices into his lungs in painful gasps. Hyperventilating reliably feels like nothing beyond that, enough so that at times he almost appreciates it. “Every time I wanted to ask you to stay, but I was too pissed to do it and you were too pissed to say you wanted to, and it’s not like either of us was going to admit why.”

Nathan forces himself to straighten up and drags the rough sleeve of his jacket across his eyes, but it only blurs his vision further. He really doesn’t want to see Duke like this, but he wasn’t lying either. He’s not ready to let him go. The compromise sparks in Nathan’s mind before he has time to argue it away or think better, and he’s carefully unzipping the body bag a second later, each click of metal teeth louder than the last. 

“Audrey’s gone, you’re gone. And the worst part is, you were still here and I could’ve told you, could’ve done something, and I couldn’t even see you. I didn’t even know you were there.” Nathan chokes on the tightness creeping into his throat and makes himself keep talking through the reproach that’s crept into his voice. “You always come back to me, eventually. Don’t suppose you could manage that one more time?”

His fingers find the silver whistle Duke always wore around his neck seconds later, and it sends a shiver through his skin even though the night should be much, much colder. It only takes a moment to pull it free, clumsily knot the cord, and slip it around his own neck. As he does, the unceasing song of wind and crickets and even the rush of the ocean hundreds of feet below narrow down to a pinpoint of silence, and Nathan swears his heart stops for a moment to honor the quiet. 

“Duke?”

It all rushes back in as fast as it disappeared, the pulse of waves and the wind raking across the tall grass in the meadow and what might be the vibration of the earth beneath his feet. The whistle goes hot and then searing against his skin in an instant, a stinging flash of pain that leaves him certain he’ll see blood on his fingertips where they grabbed at it. He feels dizzy, drunk and heavy, as if the only thing holding him up is the sense of live current galvanizing every cell, one at a time. 

Then it stops, all of it, and only the invisible weight remains to pin him in place for a second longer before fading away as well. His head aches and his hands hurt, and if he felt stupid for talking to a dead body, it’s nothing compared to the heat that flames in his face now. 

“Guess this time you’re not coming back.”

There’s nothing else to do but finish it. It’s his job, like the vigils, like checking in on people who lost family and friends. Like all the ways he segments his day into manageable sections, an hour here or fifteen minutes there, five minutes stolen in the basement records room at the station where he can squeeze his eyes shut and try to pretend that none of this is happening. He’s the one who made it out alive and unscathed again. Whether he likes it or not, he’s the one who has to carry the weight. 

Nathan drives home with whiskey on his breath and proceeds to drink himself into oblivion until the loss and whatever he felt up on the bluffs fade into the soft gray of early morning. He tries to sleep it off one more time, knowing this attempt won’t be any different than the last.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from a poem published in _Clear Creek_ by Richard Brautigan in 1971. 
> 
> Are You the Lamb of Your Own Forgiving?
> 
> I mean: Can you forgive yourself / all  
those crimes without victims?


End file.
